DSO Quad contest has a quartet of cash prizes

Seeed Studios has launched a contest centered around the DSO Quad. In case you’re unfamiliar with the hardware, the DSO Quad is a low-cost standalone oscilloscope. It’s got four channels, two of which are analog, and includes an ARM Cortex-M3 processor as well as an FPGA. Why are we recapping the hardware with the contest announcement? Because the contest rules state that you are allowed to alter the hardware despite the fact that this is more of a software-focused event.

But what you really should know about are the cash prizes going to the winners. Rank in the top four and you’ll claim $3000, $1500, $800, and $300 in cold hard cash. But even if you don’t take one of the top spots everyone still wins. That’s because all entries are open source and will be found in Seeed’s DSO Quad forums.

If judging people is more your thing Seeed needs some help with that too. They’re looking for qualified judges and application details are includes at the bottom of the contest page.

Why pay $200 for this when for $300 you can get a rigol oscilloscope what is more than 10 times better?
I’m not saying it’s a bad scope, but it’s price makes me look at something better.
To be fair, Digilent’s Analog Discovery is priced the same, but specs are better, although it doesn’t have a screen; i don’t mind using a laptop.

This makes me quite happy they’re trying to improve the software. The hardware is nice and capable but the software is terribly tedious to setup and sometimes understand where the cursor will move to next depending what buttons you press.

I own one and a 100Mhz Tek scope and the Tek is far easier to navigate around.

dso quad isn’t 14400khz bandwith, its more like 1-5mhz. I am currently working/tuning to get the analog and digital channels more than 10mhz on the V2.7 hardware. Some gain levels can even hit 15-20mhz after doing some hardware changes. It is funny Seeed Studios doing this while they didn’t release the latest fpga, sys and app sources. The latest sources community has is way old. Also the signal generator output makes noise on analog channel A. And the tvs diode on analog channels has too high capacitance and is for 5v protection, while the absolute max rating is 3.6v on that bank on the fpga, so putting a higher voltage in it than that might destroy digital.
Anyway, I am tuning the hardware, and will post hardware changes on seeedstudio forums when I am done :)